I’m going to step up on my soapbox here for just two minutes to give my $1.25 worth on some of the BMW I’ve heard/read about JURASSIC WORLD. If you’re not interested in me pontificating then please feel free to drop on down three paragraphs and read the review. I won’t be offended, I assure you.

Here’s the first thing: I’ve read reviews complaining about the lack of characterization and the predictable plot. You don’t go to a movie like JURASSIC WORLD looking for deep and meaningful characterizations. If they are there then that’s a bonus, sure. But if you pay your money and go in specifically for that then you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment and got nobody to blame but yourself. And as for the predictable plot….I mean, really? Aren’t all four of the movies in the “Jurassic Park” series basically the same movie? They play out like this: People go to island full of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs break loose. People lose their minds and run around screaming. Dinosaurs chase people. People get et. Predictable? Sure is. Half a billion bucks worth of predictable at the box office, baby. And that ain’t dinosaur poop.

And here’s the second thing: the complaints about the lack of scientific accuracy. Sigh. Really? JURASSIC WORLD is a monster movie, plain and simple. It aspires to do nothing more than be an entertaining summer spectacular that gives you a thrill ride for two hours. It is not supposed to be a documentary.

But at the same time, it’s not entirely brain dead. If you pay attention I think you’ll see that JURASSIC WORLD, while itself being a summer blockbuster movie makes a statement about summer blockbuster movies and how audiences are constantly demanding for summer movies to be bigger and louder with more stunts and even more explosions. I have no idea if the writers and director directly intended for that to be in there and if they did, it’s a wonderfully subversive element to add in there. Okay, time for me to step off my soapbox and get to the review.

Brothers Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray Mitchell (Ty Simpkins) are packed off to stay with their aunt Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) while their parents work out some marital problems. It’s not as much of a bad deal at this may seem seeing as how Aunt Claire is the Operations Manager of Jurassic World, a dinosaur theme park located on Isla Nublar (cue the John Williams theme song) Claire is much too busy trying to woo potential investors with the lure of bigger and better dinosaur attractions. Dinosaurs genetically modified by the park’s Chief Geneticist, Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) And his latest one is a doozy. He calls it Indominus Rex and it’s a biological killing machine as he used the DNA of half a dozen predatory dinosaurs to create the thing.

The Indominus Rex proves to be a lot more intelligent than anyone ever thought it could be as it manages to escape it’s enclosure and begins slaughtering its way across the island, killing humans and other dinosaurs alike as it makes its way straight to the park where the real feast awaits. It up to Velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his hunting pack of Velociraptors to track down the Indominus Rex and stop it before it busts into the park.

We’re not talking about a plot that you have to burn up brain cells thinking about. We’ve got Vincent D’Onofrio as Hoskins, the head of Security Operations who has some nebulous hair-brained idea that he can weaponize the Velociraptors for military use but he’s not the real bad guy here. He’s more of an annoyance. It’s Indominus Rex that is the true villain as it demonstrates a scary feral intelligence that gives it an unpredictability factor that goes off the charts.

Chris Pratt really impressed me here as he didn’t just fall back on doing a version of his Star-Lord/Peter Quill character from “Guardians of The Galaxy” Owen Grady is his own character in his own right and a lot of that had to do with the character’s body language. Since Grady’s hand signals, his stance and arm gestures are his way of communicating with the raptors he tends to stand absolutely still when talking with humans, not using his hands to emphasize his speech at all as most of us do. But when he’s with the raptors, his gestures and movements are very animated. It’s a small thing, I know. But to me it said a lot about the character and how he sees the raptors and his relationship to them.

I honestly don’t know if I liked Bryce Dallas Howard’s performance or not. She doesn’t have much chemistry with Pratt and she seemed to be going back and forth as if she herself wasn’t sure if her character was supposed to be the movie’s comedy relief or not. But she’s right there in the middle of the action along with Pratt and she has some pretty good lines in the scenes where Claire and Owen are in the jungle looking for her lost nephews.

I would never have guessed that Colin Trevorrow had this kind of action movie in him based on “Safety Not Guaranteed” which is a completely different type of science fiction movie and one I heartily recommend. He does an absolutely terrific job of channeling Steven Spielberg here, swiping shots from the first two “Jurassic Park” movies left and right. It’s an impressive directing job. He knows how to keep the plot moving and how to invest us in his characters and care about what happens to them.

The bottom line is this: you want to go to see JURASSIC WORLD because in the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm: “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming.”

4 thoughts on “Jurassic World”

Right on, Derrick. I thought the movie was a pretty big mess, but it was an enjoyable mess, and I like what you said about how it’s a comment on blockbusters. I’ve been saying for months that what I wanted to see was what the first film had that 2 and 3 didn’t, which was a bit of the majesty of the first film. My favorite scenes in Jurassic Park include those moments of awe – when Sam Neill is weak in the knees, the “they move in herds” line, the sneezing dinosaur, the sick triceratops, and so on. Jurassic World fails in this regard, and while that makes it a successful comment on how quickly new things become taken-for-granted things, it lacked humanity and awe and humility.

Still, while I had plenty of problems with how the story played itself out, I was constantly engaged by the movie. There were enough nods to the original films that WORLD works as one part action movie, one part nostalgia fest. I think the Bryce Dallas Howard character was all over the place, but she was game and I can respect her throwing herself into such an all-over-the-place character.

What I learned from WORLD was that if you put dinosaurs and Chris Pratt and a gorgeous redhead in a movie, I’m not going to regret buying a ticket.

At one point Bryce Dallas Howard seems to be wishing she had a mustache to twirl as she comes off as being the villain of the movie. Then she becomes the scatterbrained aunt, then Chris Pratt’s bumbling sidekick then Woman of Action. But she does it all with relish, I give her that. I certainly wasn’t bored watching her work.